ST. GEORGE — Last weekend’s snow, all sound and swirl with two measly inches of fluff, discouraged attendance at Art @ 139 Bay in St. George.

It was unfortunate. Grassroots efforts like this multi-genre African-American art showcase, organized by the Staten Island Creative Community, pull 25 percent of their audience at their openings. Happily, the show’s up through March 2. The gallery is open from 1-6 p.m. today, Feb. 23. Visit SICreative.org for details.

All but one of the participants are contemporary Islanders The lone exception is the multi-tasking 20th Century innovator, Romare Bearden (1912-88), but he had local ties through his wife, the former Nanette Rohan.

While Bearden originals would be too valuable (also too hard to secure or insure) for such a showcase, the Bearden Foundation, now run by the artist’s sisters-in-law, was happy to loan eight or 10 exhibit posters.

Together they map the varied approaches that Bearden, a consummate storyteller, used for different tasks.

For a late-night jazz-club “picture,” he preferred a pulsing, smoky style, using thinned paint or watercolor.

But, for a work like “Carolina Shout,” a memory picture of the Old South of his North Carolina childhood, he might juggle many ingredients: African motifs, newsprint, colored paper, photographs, fabric.

Mythic topics, like his famous series on the Odyssey, came from third hybrid place, partly classical, partly African, angular, colorful and packed with details.

The show has two other collagists, Sajda Mussawwir Ladner, whose “pictures” include drawn and pieced elements and Andrea Phillips, an artist who knew Bearden and likes to tell comparable stories, illustrating city life, the wages of racism, neighborhood violence and the plight of poor city dwellers.

Much as Bearden was a musician/composer before moving into visual art (he co-wrote the jazz classic “Sea Breeze”) musican/composer Vernon (“Living Colour”) Reid has moved more recently into visual art, often politically informed.

The complexities of race, an endless topic is America, are part of many works. West Brighton photographer Fern Metcalf’s backstory about the difficulties of Black Indians (people with African and Native American forebears) isn’t readily discernible in her sunlit portraits, but pride and beauty are.

Warren Lyons and Lorenzo Hail are the show’s portrait specialists. Lyons, a psychologist and painter, starts with a likeness but adds symbols and shapes dimensions and color that suggest the life of the mind.

Hail’s work, often large drawings, surfaces infrequently in Island exhibitions, but it’s always good to see. In his Art @ 39 drawings, he is often working from photographs, reducing a face to its simplest (but most characteristic) contours.

They’re elegant, appealing and often famous, depicting poet and activist Amiri Baraka and producer Quincy Jones, made from a early 1970s photograph.

Antonio Benett and Lenny Price are (separately) presenting the most elaborate objects in the exhibit. Price, who owns a Mariners Harbor body shop, recycles worn-out brake drums and carburators, rotors and fenders turning them into the body parts of a humanoid sci-fi militia. He’s motorized one of them and it walks, but it’s not in the show.

He dresses the finished being in paint but he’s careful with colors. The future world he’s imagining is already showing some wear.

Bennett’s “Sankofa Collective Consciousness,” which has the whole loft-like second floor of 39 Bay to itself is a time machine made of electrified sculptures that combine traditional West African objects with western elements, plus a throne and lengths of kente cloth.

Bennett has several ideas of equal weight at work. The simplest challenges the design esthetic of contemporary electronics. The most complicated has to do with how cultural information is gathered and stored.

The sculpture he calls the Calabash is an accessible archives of Bennett family history. Standing near it, the voices of two women can be heard, his mother Curlene Jennings Bryant and sister, Leah, are doing a Q and A about Mrs. Bennett’s time as one of the “Black Angels,”African-American nurses recruited to look after TB patients at Sea View Hospital.

Mrs. B had already made history. In 1957, she was the lone black nurse in Bellevue Hospital’s graduating class. After a stint at Sea View, she and her husband went to Liberia, where she taught classes in nutrition and established baby clinics.